In July’s First Monday, we changed the format a little. Instead of a founder journey or funding story, we hosted Gergely Bihary from ElevenLabs for a hands-on session on growth, AI tooling, and what modern marketing looks like when engineering is built into the workflow.

The timing felt right. ElevenLabs has become one of Europe’s most closely watched AI companies, scaling at a speed that puts it in a very different category from most startups. But the evening was not about the headline numbers. It was about what happens behind the scenes when a company is growing fast and the growth team still needs to keep shipping, testing, automating and finding new channels.

Gergő brought a practical presentation built around 11 concrete lessons from inside ElevenLabs. He talked about programmatic SEO, internal AI tools, website experimentation, launch velocity, and the rise of the marketing engineer — a role that sits somewhere between growth, product, software engineering and creative execution.

What made the session especially useful was how specific it was. This was not another conversation about “AI changing marketing.” It was about the actual systems, workflows and habits that help a team move faster: how to use AI internally, how to build scalable acquisition surfaces, how to experiment without overcomplicating things, and how to keep launching even when the company is growing quickly.

Gergő’s own background made the perspective sharper. Before ElevenLabs, he worked on Vertex AI at Google and product and growth projects at Prezi, bringing a technical operator’s view to a topic that is often treated too vaguely. The result was a session that connected engineering, marketing and growth in a very practical way.

The evening also showed why the community had been asking for more hands-on First Mondays. Founder stories and funding journeys are important, but sometimes the most valuable thing is a room full of people walking away with ideas they can actually try the next morning.

Huge thanks to Gergő for sharing the playbook so openly, and to everyone who came out for one of our biggest turnouts so far. First Monday will take a short break in August, and we’ll be back in September.

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